by Peter Corris
“Yes.”
“She’s been heard to say she’d kill her.”
I let out a breath. “That’d be all we need. I better call my answering service to see if she’s left a message.” I was pretty sure there’d be no message. What Penny wouldn’t trust to Sunday she wouldn’t leave with an impersonal recorded voice. I got up to go to the phone and something Sunday had said came through the channels again. I leaned over him resting my hands on the table.
“Don’t take this wrong, it’s all in confidence, but what did you say about Ricky’s father?”
“Said he was a bit of a no-hoper. Right Ted?”
Williams nodded and there was something collusive in that nod. I had the feeling that whatever information I got about Ricky’s father, it wouldn’t be the whole story.
“He did some time,” Sunday went on. “Small stuff. He’s dead now.”
“Sure of that?”
“Must be. Vanished years ago.” He opened his hands.
“Were he and Ricky close?”
Sunday sighed and I knew I was pushing it. “No,” he said.
“How was that?”
“Dunno. Ricky’s old man went off him when he was a nipper. Happens.”
“Not often.”
Sunday shrugged.
“Have you ever heard of a man called Joseph Berrigan?”
“No.” He enveloped the word in smoke.
“You don’t seem sure.”
“It rings a bell. Can’t place it though. Something to do with Ricky.”
I shook my head. “Jesus, this is getting complicated.” I went over to the bar phone and rang my service but there was no message. I got money out and reckoned up with Sadie. The bar was starting to fill up and my fighting hand was throbbing and the beer had made my thinking thick and sluggish. I felt that one more piece of information might make the pattern clear to me, might explain why a girl was running with a man who’d raped her. And fifty thousand dollars was a lot of money to be still missing. Age would not weary it nor the years condemn.
“What’s this about, Hardy? Where’s Noni?”
“Kidnapped, Jimmy, that’s the way it looks anyway.
Sunday traced a design in the spilt beer. “Always thought it was wrong, Noni and Ricky and that. What’s her chances, Hardy?”
“I don’t know. Is there anything you can think of that might help?”
“You don’t think one of us done it do you?” Williams said gruffly.
“No, but there’s missing pieces everywhere. Ricky, he’s a real mystery.”
“Why?” Sunday snapped. “Flash young bloke, bad boxer, good fucker who liked white meat.”
“So I’ve heard. What was wrong with his boxing? Ted here said it was too much bed not enough sleep.”
“Not altogether,” Sunday said. “That was part of it. You see him fight Ted?”
“No. Just in training, sparring.”
“Yeah, well he was fast enough, his legs were alright and he was game but his left was no good, stiff like. He was in a car crash when he was young, got spiked through here.” He indicated the left side of his chest.
He seemed about to say something more but he stopped himself. I was aware again of their suspicion of me. They held back as a matter of experience and pride. Pride is a hard quality to deal with in an investigation — it holds secrets and distorts facts.
“One last thing Jimmy,” I said slowly. “Where do you put Ricky in that list of yours?”
“Ricky doesn’t go on a bloody list,” Williams said harshly. His emergence from passivity gave his words unusual force. “Rick was different, he had . . . power.”
“Power,” I said.
“Yeah, some people say he was a bit mad after that accident.” He was sorry as soon as the words were out and ended lamely. “He wasn’t mad, he had power.”
I nodded and knew I had all I was going to get. Sunday gave me the Sharkeys’ telephone number and I said I’d be in touch. Williams grunted goodbye without committing himself.
The rain was a fine mist, veiling the buildings and traffic. I hunched my shoulders against it and ran for a bus stop. After a half hour wait I caught a passing taxi. The alcohol, the tension and the fresh air had done strange things to my brain. I felt I had two heads: one of them was thinking about Sunday, Coluzzi, Moody and boxing; the other about Noni, Berrigan, blackmail and bank robbery. I tried to switch off the first head as we ripped along the freeway back to the second head’s problems.
15
It was close to five o’clock when the taxi dropped me in St Peters Street. I skipped through the rain and used my key on the door of my office building. The other tenants had cleared out for the day. Trade was bad. I went up to my office, picked up the mail from the floor and settled down behind my desk. The one cheque in the collection was small enough to remind me that I had to get some more money from Tarelton. The bills could wait. I dropped them into a drawer. A fat, colourful envelope offered me the chance to win a split-level home north of Townsville with a stud farm, Mercedes sedan and power boat thrown in. I looked at the pictures; nice, pretty house, pretty horses, pretty beach. I fished out five dollars and started to fill in the ticket blanks, then I noticed that it said “No cash. Cheques or money orders only”. I screwed the stuff up and dropped it in the waste bin. Then the phone rang.
“Cliff? Grant Evans.”
I dragged my hand wearily across my face. “Shit, don’t tell me the building’s surrounded and there’s no escape.”
“Knock off the bullshit. I thought you were going to report in?”
“Who said that?”
“That was my understanding.”
“You misunderstood, mate.”
“Like that, is it? Look, this is not time for games Cliff. This thing is hotting up.”
I made a non-committal noise and he went on.
“You’re on the scene up Macleay way, we hear. You get around all the best murders don’t you?”
“She’s not dead.”
“Bloody near it. I suppose you saw the grass?”
“Is that what it was?”
“Lot of it Cliff, and there’s an enquiry on.”
“I know.”
“Do you know two Italians, one tall one short?”
“Yeah, Primo Camera and Carlo Ponti.”
“Terrific Cliff, you’re a ball of style and you’ve told all the jokes. Now I’m going to tell one. Heard the one about the private detective who lost his licence for withholding information from the police?”
“No.”
“Yeah, he’s a bus conductor, makes a hundred and fifty bucks a week and gets to wear a nice green uniform. Meets a lot of people and travels all over town.”
“Sounds nice.”
“He misses the glamour. Listen Cliff, I’m serious. We’re under real pressure to look good with these enquiries on. I’m appealing to your better nature.”
“I can’t tell you anything yet Grant. Give me twenty-four hours, maybe thirty.”
“No.”
“You have to. You owe me.”
There was a silence, then he said: “I owe you one. Are you calling it in?”
“I have to Grant.”
“OK.” He paused. “Thirty hours.”
“Thanks. And one thing — where’s Simmonds’ body?”
“Just around the corner from you, cock. Glebe morgue.”
He hung up. The line buzzed emptily and I put the receiver down. I swivelled around on my chair and looked out the window at the city. The light was just about gone and the buildings were drained of colour. They were all grey, and it didn’t matter whether they were insurance offices or churches, they were just shapes. The tops of the park trees were waving in the wind like dark, threatening tentacles. It was a good night to be with someone you knew well, in a place you liked with some good food and wine. The air in the office smelled old and stale as if it had been packaged and put there and was due for a change.
I called Saul James at home and got no answer
. They pulled him out of a rehearsal at the theatre and he told me that he’d have the money tomorrow. I said I’d collect it. Madeline Tarelton answered the phone again and said that Ted was out. He’d left a message for me that the money would be ready by noon tomorrow. I told her I’d be around to wait for the call. She seemed to want to talk but I wasn’t in the mood.
“What will you do between now and then?” she asked. There might have been a hint of invitation in that, but I didn’t want to know, not then.
“Investigate the living tonight. Tomorrow morning I’m going to look at a dead black man. A shotgun took his face away.”
It chilled her and she rang off. I left the building.
I caught a bus back to Glebe and had it to myself for most of the way. I got off near the pub, bought wine, and walked the rest of the distance. Harry Soames next door had guests. That meant they would smoke a lot of grass and sit around listening to music through headphones. Soames had installed headphones in the bathroom, in the garden. I didn’t know what sort of music he listened to any more and that suited me fine. I went into the house, drank wine, showered, drank wine, cooked an omelette and drank more wine. By nine o’clock I was as ready to break the law as I’d ever be.
I had on sneakers, dark jeans and sweater and a denim jacket. The wine glow lasted through the bus ride to the university and the tramp across the campus into Newtown. It lasted while I waited for the stragglers to leave the pub across from Trueman’s gym and there was just enough of it left for steady hands and quiet feet as I skeleton-keyed the lock to the old building. I went up the stairs by the thin beam of a pencil torch and the keys took me through the door into the gym as if I owned the place. It wasn’t my first burglary or my tenth, but I was nervous. There aren’t any faithful bobbies on the beat checking the doors and windows these days, especially in Newtown, but unusual lights or noises can still draw attention and I had no excuses. Trueman hated my guts and if I was caught at this he’d play it for all it was worth.
The gym smelled of the day’s sweat and smoke as I sneakered through to the office. The door wasn’t locked. Sammy wouldn’t keep any money here and that accounted for the absence of burglar alarms too. Sammy had had a little celebration it seemed; a Scotch bottle stood empty on the battered pine desk and beer cans and plastic cups were strewn around. The room had a heavy, rich odour produced by liquor, tobacco and human bodies. The party mess only added to what was already a mess. Trueman kept papers on spikes, in drawers, on top of chairs and on the floor. Pictures of past fighters were Sellotaped to the walls and papers were slid in behind them; letters were stuck between the pages of racing guides and bills and receipts bristled from the pocket of an old raincoat hanging on the back of the office door. It looked so unsystematic as to be burglar proof. I wasted minutes flicking through the relics of Sammy’s past failures and found nothing more recent than a picture of Tony Mundine captioned wishfully “The next cruiserweight King".
I sat in Sammy’s chair and thought as well as my noisy heart would let me. Maybe there was nothing here. Maybe I’d have to try Trueman’s house. That would be a very different proposition; Sammy had a few boys from the country living with him always and I didn’t fancy padding about in the dark in a house full of fighters. Ted Tarelton had a lot of money and I’d probably be covered for the bridge work and jaw wiring, but they say it alters the shape of the face and I was fairly content with the face I had. I fiddled with it now the way you do when you’re thinking hard; moved sections of it about and pulled bits of it. There was no way of getting inside Sammy’s mind to crack his system and that was a disgusting thought anyway. Its whole area was probably occupied by beer, boxing and bathing beauties. That led me alliteratively to books and to the one example of the animal in the office — a half-dead copy of Ray Mitchell’s The Fighting Sands and that led me to Jacko Moody’s contract. Or copies of it.
They were carbons, folded down the centre and tucked inside the book which was lying on top of Medibank forms. The contract tied Moody up for two years and was due to expire in a month. It was the standard thing; Trueman collected expenses and fees out of Moody’s purses and had sole rights to OK and veto matches. It was hard to see what the fighter himself could have been getting out of his penny-ante preliminary earnings. It was legal and binding as far as I could tell but the expiry date made Trueman vulnerable. That is, if another contract hadn’t been signed. With Coluzzi’s schemes still in the planning stage that seemed unlikely. I took one of the copies and put it in my pocket.
I was straightening the papers when a noise out in the gym made me freeze. I clicked off the light and the tiny noise sounded like a gunshot. Four steps took me over to the door which I’d left open and I peered out into the darkness of the big, pungent room. I could hear feet shuffling on the floor and harsh, stifled breathing. I slid out of the office and along the nearest wall. No weapons came to hand and the torch was slim, elegant and useless. There was a muttered curse in the darkness and a floundering, stumbling noise and I used the cover of it to make it across to the locker bay. I pressed myself back against the cold metal and ran a hand across the top of the set of lockers feeling for a weapon. Nothing . . . just dust. I was fighting against a shattering sneeze when the light over the ring came on.
A man was standing in the middle of the ring holding his hands up above his head. As a picture of athletic triumph it was spoiled by the bottle in his hand. He kept one hand raised, brought the other, the one holding the bottle, down and took a long, gargling drink. He walked carefully over to the red corner and set the bottle down on the stool. Then he moved back to centre ring and began to shadow-box. He was as drunk as an owl and his movements were a broken, uncoordinated parody of the boxer’s grace. He blundered into the ropes, fell and crawled across to the stool. The sleeve of his coat had come down across his hand; it was a cast-off coat, a derro coat, and he fought for what seemed like minutes to get clear of it and to get hold of the bottle. He made it and took a quick slug. He pulled himself up by the ropes and struck the attitude of a fight announcer. He mimed pulling a microphone down from the roof.
“Ladeez an’ gennlemen,” he bellowed, “fifteen roun’s of boxing, for the lightweight champeenship of th’ world. In th’ red corner,” he pointed to the bottle, “at nine stone nine pounds, Taffy . . . Taffy Thomas.’’ He flung out his arm, lost balance and collapsed to the floor. He tried to pull himself up again but thought better of it. He crawled to the corner again and used the bottle. It fell from his hand onto the apron of the ring and off to the floor. He pitched forward, rested his head on his arms and went to sleep. I came across to look at him; the ear showing was cauliflowered and his body was pear-shaped and dumpy inside the formless coat. I’d never seen him fight but I’d heard about him. It wasn’t that long ago.
I doused the light and left the gym.
16
It was after midnight when I got home. The house next door was dark and quiet; no-one around to spot Raffles sneaking back with His Lordship’s silver. I’d forgotten to check the mailbox earlier and I reached into it now and pulled out an airletter. I read it over a cigarette and a glass of wine. Ailsa was in Samoa and missing me; I was in Sydney and missing her and Samoa. I distributed the papers I’d taken from Trueman’s office among the pages of the three volumes of Bertrand Russell’s autobiography. Cyn had bought me the books, one by one, as they’d come out, and written inscriptions in them. I didn’t read the inscriptions. There was dust on the books and I opened and closed them hard, blew on them and put them back on the shelves. I didn’t spend enough time at home to get around to dusting bookshelves. There were probably silverfish too, maybe mice. It would be a good house for mice, nice and quiet with just the occasional scrap of food around. I went upstairs to bed, quietly, so as not to disturb my mice.
The city morgue is in the basement of a low, long building the colour of dried blood. The building houses the Coroner’s Court and the Forensic Medicine division; the live people go in the front of
f Parramatta Road, the dead ones go in the back off Arundel Street.
The desk attendant was thin and hatchet-faced. He wore a narrow black tie, a brilliantly white shirt and an even whiter coat. I showed him my licence and told him my business and he didn’t like any of it. His voice was a thin bleat: “I haven’t the requisite authority to show cadavers to members of the public.”
“I don’t want to see your whole collection — just one.”
“The rule applies.”
“I’m investigating his death.”
“Not officially, and you have no proof of that.”
I needed a name. Not Evans. He wouldn’t bail me out of this. I reached around in my mind and came up with it.
“Dr Foster, the police forensic man will OK it,” I said. “Call him and see.”
It was bluff and weak as a politician’s promise but it did the trick. He didn’t want to bother the brass.
“Very well. Take this down those stairs and show the man at the door.” He scribbled the time, date and three initials on a card and pointed to a set of stairs descending into the bowels of the earth. I went down three flights. It got cooler and the tiles got bleaker and my steps rang sharply in the still, clinical air.
The man at the door was the exact opposite of his counterpart upstairs. He was red-faced and cheerful, over-weight and scruffy around the neck and lapels. He took the card and stuffed it into the torn pocket of his coat.
“Through here mate,” he chirped. “Keep your breakfast down won’t you.”
I said I would and followed him through a set of heavy perspex doors. The room reminded me of a changing room at a swimming pool. It had a concrete floor and mirrors at either end. It was white-tiled with a green strip around it at shoulder height for a touch of gaiety. The fluorescent light was harsh and instead of the swimming pool’s smell of chlorine and sweat this place reeked of formaldehyde. There were steel handles sticking out of the walls, waist high at six-foot intervals. We stood in the centre of the room by a bench that had straps attached to it and a shallow basin mounted beside it. A gutter ran from the basin to a channel in the floor. The attendant asked me who I wanted to see as if he was in charge of a theatre dressing room. I told him.
